Thank you for listening to the show. It's the perfect mix of my two passions: podcasting and gardening. They both come together to create The Still Growing Gardening Podcast and bring it to life each week.

That’s the official greeting of the world's most abundant
domestic animal - chickens. Today we’re
learning How to Speak Chicken with expert chicken
translator Melissa Caughey of the blog
Tilly’s Nest and the new book with the intriguing
and quirky title, How to Speak Chicken. I’ve done
lots of interviews over the years - and I guarantee you, this is
one that I will personally never forget.

You may think that studying chicken behavior and
communication sounds silly or even ridiculous. But, if
you’re raising chickens, you probably know that this kind of
information is exactly the subject of many discussions and threads
in chicken forums. Once you get over the novelty of the topic,
people generally discover that Melissa’s information is very useful
and interesting. In fact, feedback on Melissa’s book and her
presentations on the topic of How to Speak Chicken - where
she covers How to Discover the Language, Emotions,
Etiquette, and Smarts of the Flock - show that folks
want to understand their chickens better and her
book allows people to connect with them.

People have been living with chickens for at least 6,000
years, and the world-wide domesticated chicken population
now exceeds 19 billion. Despite hanging out
together for as long as we have, few people have given serious
consideration to the potential meaning of chicken
vocalizations.

Turns out, chickens are loquacious creatures
and chicken owners generally grow accustomed to hearing their
patterns of speech. In one article I read recently, a chicken
farmer found his chicken house oddly quiet one morning (a
time which is pretty chatty and noisy for chickens.) Instead,
the birds were murmuring and lethargic. He soon discovered
his lighting system had failed and the lights had
not switched off the night before; the chickens hadn’t got much
sleep and were sleep-deprived from their
all-nighter. If the farmer had been able to eavesdrop on the flock,
he might have known much sooner that his flock needed help.

I like to call Melissa a Chicken Translator -
something I thought would be a one-of-a-kind job. As it happens,
she’s keeping good company; there are scientists at the
University of Georgia University and Georgia Institute of
Technology that have been studying chicken "language” in
an effort to help poultry farmers with the ability to
monitor and modify lighting, temperature, ventilation, feeding
systems and health. For instance, the Artificial Intelligence (AI)
monitors can tell when birds are feeling heat stress just from the
sounds they are making. It also alerts when the birds have a
respiratory infection because of the sound they make when mucus
clogs their airways.

In addition, a recent study published in Springer’s
Journal of Animal Cognition by senior scientist
Lori Marino, reviewed the latest research about
the psychology, behavior and emotions. The result? She found that
chicken intelligence has been majorly
underestimated. Furthermore, research has shown that
chicken communication consists of at least 24 distinct
vocalizations - as well as different visual displays. Roosters
will sound distinct alarm calls for different
kinds of predators. Recent findings reveal that chicken
communication is pretty complex and that suggests that
chickens have cognitive awareness, and even more
sophisticated capacities such as perspective-taking and
deception.

Melissa’s work would get a stamp of approval from
Wallace Berry, a poultry scientist at
Auburn University’s College of Agriculture. Berry
recently said, “Some farmers tell me that despite all the
gadgets, their most important piece of technology (for
understanding chickens) is a five-gallon bucket. They turn it over
and sit on it, and watch the birds for hours. They learn what a
normal house looks and sounds like. If the chickens are content,
there is a certain way they sound. If they are cold or hot, there
are certain sounds they make. This is what (the researchers) are
trying to do in an automated way. It makes perfect sense.”

Melissa begins her book by sharing how you can better
learn to listen to your own chickens. She suggests
sitting with them quietly and watching. Just chill with
your chickens until they forget about you sitting there
and start chatting with each other. By watching her flock, Melissa
learned their sounds, and amazingly, when she repeated those
sounds, her chickens understood! One time, she
repeated their aerial warning cry, and the chickens
freaked: they stopped in their tracks and
looked up at the sky. It’s kind of like in the movie
Arrival - one of my favorites - when Amy
Adams character figures out a way to talk to the aliens.
Talk about a breakthrough!

In all seriousness though, in today’s episode, you’ll
hear Melissa speak chicken. (And, can I just say that she
surprised me to death when she asked me to give it a try, too!)
Our whole conversation had me in a constant state of
fascination and amazement. So if you’re a
chicken geek looking to understand your chickens better,
check out Melissa’s book How to Speak Chicken. It’s
the perfect gift for your favorite chicken keeper. And, if you have
kids, don’t miss Melissa’s award-winning book, A Kid’s Guide to
Keeping Chickens. Alright - I hope you’re ready to have some
fun, to push the boundaries of what you think of when it comes to
chickens, let’s learn How to Speak Chicken with the
Queen of Chicken Speak - the Chicken
Translator - (and a jack of many trades as you are about
to discover) - the talented and insightful Melissa Caughey.

About the Podcast

Still Growing is a weekly gardening podcast dedicated to helping you and your garden grow.
Jennifer Ebeling is a home and garden blogger at 6ftmama.com & host of the Still Growing gardening podcast (available on iTunes & Stitcher Radio). Jennifer writes and records for the show in her home studio in lovely Maple Grove, Minnesota. You can read more about Jennifer on her About Page.
You can contact her at Jennifer {at} 6ftmama.com.